Countdown: Maple Leafs wise to load up power play

The Countdown is a quick look at some of the big stories in hockey in the last week. This time, we look at the Leafs’ power play, cutting down on screen time, fighting in training camp, yeah even the stupid Leafs’ power play, and other stuff!

1.5325 trillion. Nashville

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked.

The fact that the Predators are standing behind Austin Watson, who pleaded no contest to assaulting a woman this summer, after his 27-game suspension from the NHL.

There was a lot of talk about supporting family and Watson is family and you don’t throw people out just because they screw up and all that. Which is very gross, especially for an organization that has a domestic violence campaign.

What’s the reoffending rate on perpetrators domestic violence, like almost 40 percent do it again in the next 24 months? Pretty good for the Preds to back that kind of thing, which they’d know if they paid attention to the literature on the topic.

People wanted to give them a pass on the Mike Ribeiro stuff, probably because it was all Alleged and In The Past. This, not so much. You gotta ask yourself if you, say, cover this team on a regular basis, how you just handle this as if it’s no big deal; like how, whenever you talk to David Poile, are you not like, “So the Watson thing, that really speaks poorly of the kind of person you are, huh?” I really wanted to be able to root for this fun team of good, exciting players this season, but you can’t do that in good conscience now. Anyone who does, I dunno how you compartmentalize that. I dunno how you cheer for Watson to do anything but get absolutely buried on every shift when he comes back for Game 28.

And yeah, people are mad at the NHLPA for appealing the suspension, but that’s the sort of thing you have to do as a union on behalf of your members. Because if you don’t push back on even the really bad stuff, the definition of what teams or the league wants to do that’s really bad starts changing fast.

Not that “getting handsy” with your domestic partner is at all excusable, but it’s more about putting a check on the league’s attempts at gaining more power, because letting something go here and there because, well, Watson deserved a hell of a lot more than 27 games, only gets to the point where more of players’ collectively rights are being stripped away.

6. Shady dealings

Like, look, Jake Dotchin might have his contract terminated because he showed up to camp out of shape.

Should he have gone to camp without doing laps or whatever this summer? No. Does it justify the Bolts being able to terminate his contract? Also no. It’s the same kind of bad-faith stuff that got Mike Richards’ contract terminated a few years ago (though that ended with the Kings paying him a settlement nto the 2030s, which isn’t so bad if you’re Richards).

Ask around the league and no one has ever seen anything like this. One imagines that Dotchin did everything but show up to camp smoking four cigarettes simultaneously to get this kind of action taken against him, but it’s another slippery slope.

One wonders if all this stuff — the Watson 27-gamer (which, while not enough, is still a third of the season), the Dotchin attempted termination, the Nate Schmidt drug test thing — is just a little gamesmanship from the ownership side ahead of what’s expected to be another round of contentious CBA negotiations a year from now.

5. Contract stuff

With Darnell Nurse and Josh Morrissey now signed, only Willy Nylander, Miles Wood, Sam Reinhart, Nick Ritchie and Shea Theodore remain unsigned as of this writing. Doesn’t seem like there’s much of an end in sight for any of them.

One assumes this is because teams want to go both long and cheap on these deals and players obviously don’t. The Morrissey contract, a bridge deal, made the decision easy for Nurse. One imagines Shea Theodore (rightly) sees himself as being in a different class than those other defenders, so he’s still unsigned.

4. Loading up the power play

Speaking of the Leafs: I saw where the decision made by Mike Babcock is to try to continue the success of Toronto’s power play last season, and only make one change to the top unit: Putting Auston Matthews and John Tavares with Kadri, Marner, and Rielly. Tavares will be in the van Riemsdyk netfronting role, which makes sense.

That’s really loading it up though, eh? Not sure where that leaves your second unit (and specifically Nylander, once they sign him) but maybe it doesn’t matter. I’m not a big believer that you need your second unit as much as people think; unless the top guys are just getting the pucks cleared on them for the first minute, they should be out there for at least 90 seconds.

Anyway, probably not the best news for Willy Nylander to lose Matthews from his power play unit. Unless they go five forwards on PP1. Just a suggestion…..

3. Preseason hockey

As of this writing I have so far watched at least part of four preseason games in three days and some of these rosters have been something else.

With most of the Bruins in China, the guys they dressed for their Sunday afternoon game against the Capitals was horrendous. And the Caps’ weren’t much better, despite the lack of a good “we’re on two different sides of the international date line” excuse. It was borderline false advertising to call that an NHL game. And boy have most of those games felt like they were short-staffed, too.

Doesn’t really matter. It’s hockey and if I get to see Nick Lappin be the best player in a Devils/Rangers game or watch Jakub Lauko rip a beautiful wrist shot into the net, well, that’s still hockey baby!!!! I love it even if it’s not particularly good.

2. Nobodies

Nicolas Deslauriers is going to miss a pretty good chunk of the start of the season.

He’s out at least a few weeks with a facial fracture that required surgery. He got it in a fight with *squinting at card* Brandon Baddock, a person I as a professional hockey writer who pays good attention to prospects stuff, have never heard of.

The internet tells me Baddock is 23 and played in the ECHL as recently as two seasons ago, and had seven points and 109 penalty minutes in just 53 games for Binghamton last season. Which is to say: This guy sucks but he fights people and teams love that crap in the minors.

The problem, then, is that Baddock was a warm body on a night when his Devils were going split-squad and he decided he was gonna try to drop the gloves with a legitimate NHL player to, I dunno, make a name for himself or get noticed or something like that.

Watch the clip. There’s the briefest of scrums along the boards, the puck squirts out pretty quick, away from Deslauriers, and Baddock comes up behind and basically jumps him. Baddock’s gloves were off before Deslauriers even turned around.

Fighting should be banned in the preseason just like it should be banned at rookie camps and tournaments, and hell while you’re at it you might as well ban it for the regular season and playoffs too. This stuff is so stupid, man. I gotta tell ya.

This is a guy most Devils fans couldn’t pick out a split-squad lineup and he gets to put an NHL player on the shelf for a month and a half so he can stay in training camp and get two extra days’ worth of per diem. If that’s the kind of thing we’re gonna encourage, this sport sucks, but it’s great news for a guy who’s gonna be in the AHL again, playing seven minutes a night, before the end of the week.

So congrats, bud. We all know who you are now.

1. Veterans just don’t understand

Apparently whatever team Michael Del Zotto plays for now — the Canucks? Huh, if you say so — is thinking about banning the young players on the roster from playing Fortnite because that’s only the kind of thing you’re supposed to do in the summer.

Now, look, did the Calgary Flames famously bring gaming rigs and run cables on team flights so they could have LAN parties and play Age of Empires II back in the early 2000s? Sure they did. And did Sid Crosby and Marc-Andre Fleury organize all-Penguins games of SOCOM: Navy Seals? Yeah. And do Joe Thornton and Rick Nash have a years-long series of games of Risk they play on their iPads? Of course.

But that was different!

Congrats to the oldest group of millennials (of which Del Zotto is firmly a part) on continuing the tradition started by baby boomers and picked up by Gen X: Slamming the door behind them on being able to do fun things. “Tut tut,” they say at the faintest mention of Slurp Juice. “You are not allowed to play video games, and must only do things Serious Hockey Men do.” Now, no word on whether Mike Del Zotto getting at Lisa Ann about dating arrangements is considered part of that, but hey, who knows right?

Boys Will Be Boys, unless they do the dab after scoring a goal.

Let the teens game!!!!!

(Not ranked this week: Being Sasha Barkov.

While waiting for some preseason game or another to start the other night I saw someone on NHL Network earnestly arguing that Phil Kessel is a more valuable player than Aleksander Barkov. Made me upset!

Barkov, fresh off being named captain of the Florida Panthers, deserves a lot better than that. While I wouldn’t put him in the top five centers in the league quite yet — in some order: McDavid, Crosby, Malkin, Matthews, Bergeron, and Kopitar have to be in front of him — to leave him out of the top seven or eight is a joke.

I didn’t know how people get to go on TV but apparently if you can find a propped-open door you’re allowed to just get on camera and say whatever you want.

That’s fun.)

Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)

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